“It’s called Ishurdi. It means ‘where God stays,’” Sarker Protick says as he tells me about the district in Bangladesh where he’s been photographing his latest project, Of River and Lost Lands.

Protick, a lover of rivers and an admirer of “good old American road trip–style photography,” began wandering the length of the Padma River, starting in the north and traveling from district to district toward his home in Dhaka. But when he arrived in the Ishurdi district, his plans changed. Something about its landscape haunted him. “In previous places that I had been, the land wasn’t that high from the river. [In Ishurdi] it was very high, and at the edge of the river the land ended suddenly.